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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

My sons and I took a less-common-than-it-used-to-be trip today to my favorite independent book store (the mighty Montclair Book Center), and came away with a big pile of books. (I should mention that we went in with a larger pile of books; the MBC does a fine business in buying and selling used books, so I use them to maintain the book fissionable mass of my house at just under critical.)

Thing 1 walked out with one manga volume -- everything else he vaguely wanted (mostly Ranma 1/2, as far as I could tell) he tried to hide from me, and so wasn't going to try to convince me to let him take it home -- and Thing 2 grabbed a mind-boggling six Garfield strip collections, all of them at just a few dollars apiece.

And, for me, here's what I found:

Manhood for Amateurs, a newish collection of essays by Michael Chabon, which I've finally given up on getting from the library. It's also a very attractive book, with a spiffy die-cut cover and a wonderfully old-fashioned Harper logo, so it has some value as a neat decorative object. And, finally, I've always been more interested in the occasional nonfiction of novelists than in their novels themselves -- I can't explain it, but it's true. So I'm actually more likely to read this than to pull down The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (which has been on my shelves for close to a decade now, unread).

Wish You Were Here, another novel by Stewart O'Nan. I've so far been reading his short novels, which have all been amazingly strong, but also quite depressing. This is one of his longer works, which either means it will make me want to slit my wrists or will be in a slightly different emotional register -- I'm hoping it's the latter.

Captain Freedom, a superhero novel by G. Xavier Robillard. I've been planning to inter-library loan this for at least six months now, but I found it in person and just paid for the darn thing.

Causing a Scene by Charlie Todd and Alex Scordelis, the story of Improv Everywhere. Since tomorrow will be the big annual No Pants Subway Ride, I figured I should get their book and see about the other oddball crowdsourced stunts/entertainments that they've done.

Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously uncollected works by the guy in the title. Still uncollected after a hundred years in the tomb? These are probably not prime Twain, but it's a short book, and I'm curious.

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, the graphic novel about someone ripping the heads off modernists in 1907 Paris that led to a case of corrupting a minor in Georgia. I saw it; I realized I still hadn't read it; I bought it.
Paul Hornschemeier is a graphic novelist I haven't paid enough attention to so far, so I grabbed his Mother, Come Home when I saw it there. (Half-price, too; I bet it was someone else's copy first, though you can't tell by looking at it.)

And last was Joe Sacco's big new graphic journalism look at a couple of massacres in 1956, Footnotes in Gaza. I like buying books like this in real bookstores whenever possible, because it encourages them.